The new Dennis The Menace & Gnasher TV series on children’s BBC starts on September 7th (just in time for back to school). It looks and sounds a lot better than the 1996 25 minute per episode version which was a rather too diluted thing altogether.No doubt it will be less anarchic than Dennis at his best and the voice still isn’t right, more “Horrid Henry” than the Dennis I always heard in my head.Molly thought it looked pretty good, so that’s at least one 10 year old tuning in.
The new animation has already prompted the usual wailing and gnashing (sorry) in the press about toning the show down; allegations of removing the edge, taking out any weaponry, no picking on Walter the Softy. The Mail managed to get a nice piece of BBC bashing and accusations of PC behaviour within the opening paragraph:
Dennis is no longer the menace he once was after a BBC makeover that has transformed him into a politically correct shadow of his former self.
There’s very little information available about it as far as I can see, but Down The Tubes had this from 2007:
“The series is currently in pre-production and will aim to retain Dennis’s classic streak of schoolboy naughtiness and charm. The BBC said it was really interested in a new series but wanted the format to be more compact and exciting, Benjamin Gray, DC Thomson’s executive manager, revealed, referring we assume to shows such as the 1996 Dennis and Gnasher animated series. “We feel we have got that with this new series.”
More video and not many details on the promotional website and fun and games on the CBBC website. More wonderful comic strip Dennis available every week in the Beano and online at Beanotown.
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August 21st, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Dennis sounds like Jane Horrocks.
August 22nd, 2009 at 2:44 am
Sigh. The national press love to fabricate these anti-pc myths don’t they? Like the “Desperate Dan no longer eats cow pies” tale, this story isn’t true either.
If they bothered to check out the Dennis and Gnasher site they’d see that he’s referred to as “the number one MENACE (my emphasis) in Beanotown” and the vid shows Gnasher biting someone’s arm. Hardly the sanitized cartoon the Mail and The Sun claim it is.
The trouble with the anti-pc brigade is they always compare comics/cartoons of today to those of their youth and assume any changes have happened overnight. Truth is British comic characters have evolved gradually over the decades. That said, not only does The Beano still feature catapults but it even gave one away as a free gift the other week! “Politically correct” my a***.
August 24th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Good on you, Lew, we strongly desire that you continue in the fine footsteps of Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale and keep corrupting the comics reading youth, the kids have never had a problem with it and the only adults who panic about it are probably the ones who weren’t given a proper comics and cartoons centred upbringing, poor souls. I read the Beano every week as a kid, watched endless Tom & Jerry cartoons and yet I almost never hit anyone in the face with a frying pan or launch a giant-toothed gnashing dog at someone using an oversize novelty Acme catapult (or really dogapult in that case), so clearly it doesn’t encourage such behaviour. At least, not every day.